Quotes About Understanding

Anyone who wants to understand the world should be open to new facts and new arguments, even on subjects where his or her views are very well established. Similarly, anyone truly interested in morality—in the principles of behavior that allow people to flourish—should be open to new evidence and new arguments that bear upon questions of happiness and suffering. Clearly, the chief enemy of open conversation is dogmatism in all its forms. Dogmatism

As manuals for contemplative understanding, the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can be found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted, time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition.

The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behavior.

Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available.

Mentir es, casi por definición, negarse a cooperar con los demás. Mentir combina en un único acto la falta de confianza y de honradez. Es al mismo tiempo un fallo de comprensión y una falta de voluntad de ser comprendido. Mentir es dar un paso atrás en la relación.

The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer obscured.

In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior.

One thing each of us knows for certain is that reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it.

We cannot live by reason alone.

I think it would be extremely helpful if people focused on the ideas being discussed here, rather than on calling you names—which is an easy way to ignore your ideas.

As human being, we live in a perpetual conversation between conversation and violence; what apart from fundamental willingness to be reasonable, can guarantee that we will keep talking to one another?

Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft.

What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

Knowing what a person believes on a certain subject is not identical to knowing how that person thinks.

With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine.

texts don't speak for themselves

Unless someone is suicidal or otherwise on the brink, deciding how much he should know about himself seems the quintessence of arrogance. What attitude could be more disrespectful of those we care about?

The view that no text speaks for itself, and our relationship to scripture being about spirituality more than legalese, do not require one to be a believer in God to concede the point.

With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever

If the laws of nature do not strike most of us as incompatible with free will, that is because we have not imagined how human behavior would appear if all cause-and-effect relationships were understood.

Are you saying that the assistant had the answers all along, he just wasn't telling anyone?

If you can eliminate the yelling and listen to the message, there's a great message there.

It's great to be great, but its greater to be human.

There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell 'em.